go big
I’m not exactly sure who recommended it, but there is a book Go Big or Go Home that’s a how-to for growing a startup. It’s pretty popular, actually, and heralded as instructional rather than anecdotal.
Just the title of the book is something that I need to tell myself pretty regularly. It’s against my nature to be loud and big and pushy and all that stuff that the phrase implies. But I’ve learned from experience that anytime I’ve pushed myself and “gone big” with something, the net result has been positive.
It’s a little like gambling. If you bring a sock full of nickles to the casino and play a few slots, you’re almost certainly not going home with the jackpot. But, if you save up some bucks, and spend a few hundred playing blackjack, it’ll last longer, and if you leave the casino up 4%, you can at least afford to buy a decent dinner (and have gotten a slew of free drinks, and a compped stay, and some vouchers for a show).
Same thing with vacation or going out on the town. Whenever we’ve gone out, we go big, and have a blast. We come home with exactly what you would want out of a fun weekend or trip: lots of stories that’ll last forever.
Same thing goes with the stuff I’m working on in the house. I don’t have tens of thousands laying around in cash to throw at this stuff, so I have to chip at it a little at a time. But, I have to seek the best. The paint is top-notch, the trim isn’t cheap, the dimmers aren’t your average slidey-jobbies, and last weekend, in a dual-purpose trip to Boston, I acquired $3500 worth of kitchen and bath fixtures from a friend that are the pinnacle of top-of-the-line (and paid less than cost 
). It’s a bit of a stretch right now, but it’s worth it in the end. I end up with stuff that’ll make me happy, and when I go to sell this house, it’ll be one of those “wow” moments for a prospective buyer that might just seal the deal.
Pulling all this back to my professional life, as I said before, it’s been tough for me to “go big” naturally. I tend to be rather conservative and cautious in the way I do things. It’s my nature to be safe and well-planned with serious matters like development. In the past few years, I have learned that playing it safe gets you nowhere. There is little advantage to being conservative or cautious when working on a project or making a choice. It’s the big and brazen moves that get you somewhere and get you noticed (if that’s what you’re looking for).
That’s all very abstract and vague. In a veiled way, I’m illustrating my experience (think pointillism) _outside_ of development. The choices I made in the not-so-recent past tended to be safe and cautious and grounded in pragmatism. All in all, they weren’t bad choices at all. In the past year+, I’ve made some big choices. Bought a house, left my safe job, spent money on renovations, done some travel. All of it has been rewarding, and I wouldn’t do it differently. Stopping to look back and wonder if I could have done it better is good, but second guessing my choices would be bad.
When it comes to development, here’s how it applies: think big. It’s naiive to think that whatever you’re working on right now will always stay the way it is. If that one thing never changes, it’s a bad thing. It means a) nobody uses it and b) nobody cares about it. By the same token, doing something half-assed only means you’re going to have to do it again. In some cases where time-to-market is the biggest issue, that can be overlooked, but for the most part, sacrificing quality is the last thing that should be done when a project is no longer operating in ideal conditions.
In a profession that is as based in logic and mathematics as this, there are some good measurable ways of evaluating the quality of what you’ve done. It’s traffic scalability, it’s adaptability when needs change, it’s the ability to add new features, and often it’s adherence to standards. There is a similarly important and large portion of development that’s aesthetic and subjective, which, to a certain degree, can also be evaluated. Is it appropriate, is it stylistically up-to-date, is it usable.
Whenever I’ve approached a new and unsolved problem, I strive to not only do my personal best, but to have it stack up. I relish the challenge of not only doing what’s asked, but at the very least doing it up to standards. We’re talking database normalization, W3C/508/etc compliance, browser compatibility.
It’s important to me that what I produce is of the highest quality I can muster. Otherwise, I’m just another one of those web hacks out there makin a buck off of people who don’t know better. I’m better than that, and I hope it shows.